Samsung’s opening salvo this year includes the Galaxy S23 Series. While the S23 and the S23+ are impressive on their own, the S23 Ultra is a different beast altogether.
At a glance, the S23 Ultra looks a lot similar to last year’s S22 Ultra. But what Samsung did here is make a couple of changes in the edges, giving the device a more boxier look. This little tweak made all the difference when it comes to feel. The S23 Ultra definitely has a much firmer and comfortable grip, and the fear of it slipping off your hand has been significantly reduced.
The previous S22 Ultra felt like an experiment on Samsung’s part as it seemed they had merged the S and the Note series together, paving the way for the Fold and the Flip Series. With the S23 Ultra, it is cementing its position as the Note replacement, by having a large screen, top-of-the-line specs, and of course, the S Pen stylus.
But the best feature that comes with the S23 Ultra are the cameras. It wasn’t the typical one-year upgrades you’d come to expect in flagship phones. Samsung has packed years’ worth of camera refinements in the S23 Ultra. The colors have never been brighter than before, its space zoom is more impressive than last year’s, and the night photography – sorry, “nightography” – is simply one of the very best out there right now.
Sample moonshots with the S23 Ultra.
There is one thing we haven’t tried out, it’s Samsung’s Astro Hyperlapse. Something they’re saying that you can take a hyperlapse of the night sky and watch the stars move in warp speed animation, which sounds really cool. However, given that we live in the city where the amount of light makes it hard to see the stars, we would need to be in a faraway location, somewhere truly remote, in one of the other less populated 7,000 islands or up in a mountain. If one of the MB TechNew ever goes to a similar location with the S23 Ultra at hand, we’ll definitely show you guys that feature.
One of the interesting things we’ve noticed about the S23 Ultra, is that it’s a device meant for content creation. Besides the impressive camera, it has a couple of interesting features such as using the S Pen to highlight the subject of an image, and the S23 Ultra is smart enough to remove the background. Just like that, you have a YouTube thumbnail. It’s fast, efficient, and fun to use.
The S23 Ultra’s new One UI 5.1 allows some customization, including stacking widgets to conserve space. Sure, it’s nothing new, but it’s a great feature to have. This new software update will also be rolling to older Samsung devices, like the S22 Ultra.
We’ve discussed the specs sheet in a previous article. But just to recap, the S23 Ultra uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 8-12GB RAM, storage starting from 128 all the way up to 1TB and ships without a microSD card slot.
The 5000mAh battery is sufficient in most cases. I’ve been using the S23 Ultra since the start of the month and with light uses, such as plain boring texts, Messenger/WhatsApp, and using Waze, it took me about two days before I needed to charge. However,in moderate use, which means for me, being more frequent in social media, occasionally watching 15-min YouTube videos, and taking a couple of pictures and videos, I needed to charge by the end of the day. However, I still had over 20 percent and was confident that if I remain frugal with my phone use the next day, I’d have just enough to last me until night. Heavy use, which basically means for me, is to use the phone for the sole purpose to take countless pictures and videos for hours, then, this combined with mobile data on, the S23 Ultra lasted about six, almost seven hours for me, which I still thought the device held itself pretty well in that regard.
In the end, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra feels like a refined version of the S22 Ultra. It’s neat, looks fantastic, and is a powerful flagship device. That killer zoom is something to marvel at and the S Pen stylus is always a fun thing to have for productivity or playing some games. There is no doubt in our book the Samsung S23 Ultra is one of the best flagship phones currently out.
The S23 Series will be launching real soon in the country.